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Here Lies

“Stupid america, remember that chicanito f lunking math and english he is the picasso of your western states but he will die with one thousand masterpieces hanging only from his mind.”

Here Lies

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nown as the “poet laureate de Aztlán” and called “the grandfather of Chicano literature,” Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado used his words to fight for justice and equal opportunity for people of Mexican descent living in the United States. Delgado was twelve years old when he emigrated from northern Mexico to El Paso, Texas, and his development as a poet and writer were integral to the Chicano Civil Rights movement. His poems both reflect the suffering of the oppressed and are a call to action.

Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado (1930-2004) was a poet, activist and educator. His poems have been included in numerous textbooks and anthologies, and in 1978 his book, Letters to Louise, won the national prize for Chicano literature, the Premio Quinto Sol. Jarica Linn Watts holds a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from the University of Utah, where she also teaches English. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, modern literature and minority discourses. Dr. Watts lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and young daughter. Arte Público Press University of Houston 452 Cullen Performance Hall Houston, TX 77204-2004 www.artepublicopress.com Order by phone: 800-633-ARTE COVER DESIGN BY PILAR ESPINO PHOTO COURTESY OF ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS ARCHIVES

The Collected Poems of

Delgado’s reputation as a pioneering Chicano poet and revolutionary makes this collection a must-read for anyone interested in the Chicano Civil Rights movement and the origins of Chicano literature.

ABEL ARDO DELGADO

Available for the first time to mainstream audiences, Delgado’s poems included in this landmark volume were written between 1969 and 2001, and are in Spanish, English and a hybrid of both languages. While many poems protest mistreatment and discrimination, especially as experienced by farm workers, others focus on love of family and for the land and traditions of his people.

The Collected Poems of ABEL ARDO DELGADO

Here Lies The Collected Poems of ABEL ARDO DELGADO

La Tierra la tierra is la raza’s kissing cousin, she’s the patient mother who will listen to the sun-baked lament of the one who toils, she’s playmate to the growing dozen. she’s the sweetheart of young chicano dreamers decorating those dreams with live green streamers, she’s the woman with the perfumed sexy soils, her somber existence through yonder glimmers. she is the banner of the revolution and wide battlefield and source of its solution, nourishment of men or mirror of turmoils, womb of all that starts, tomb of all conclusion. méjico got some of you back . . . how dismal, new mexicans reclaim you . . . odds abysmal and texans wash their hands with your spat-out oils, while californians sing from your gold hymnal. men love you, hate you, regulate you, they sell you, trade you and speculate you, they build, they plant, they mine and from your despoils bring life . . . comfort, riches and glamour anew. while the arabs and jews over you dispute the price of your foot an anglo will compute, but only the soul of one, like a snake recoils, soul chicano which unison it can’t repute. look . . . a chicano’s skin is adobe vented, his wrinkles are surcos that time itself planted, the mud that in his veins passionately boils, and his soul something that la tierra invented.

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El Macho how does your own culture judge you a macho? how soon do you stop being a muchacho? why do you wear as heart a ripe pistachio and why does it pump contrasts instead of blood? I’m the measure by which my culture judges, I am a man at twelve needing no crutches, I wear a heart that has no room for grudges, my whole being is a paradox of mud. tell, why does an hembra find you attractive? does a man think your friendship is protective? why does suffering find you none receptive and why is your anger like a human flood? women find my love brutal yet so gentle, ’cause a man knows my friendship will all mantle, suffering and I grew in the same ventral, my anger cries justice as if I were God. tell me, macho, why does your bronze forehead swell as if in it was housed heaven or hell? with your gaze alone an enemy you fell, are, are you that good, you literal brown stud? the Indian pride I house in me is the earth which gives us food and life its true worth, my dark eyes can also wake the dead with myrth, not a stud but stallion choosing my own cud. why must your word be always final and curt and must you, mexican masochist, hunt hurt? will you even compromise ’til death from birth? will you let me use your brown divining rod? 6

my word is a contract that my handshake signs, pain is my thing, it’s with it that my soul refines, compromising is machismo’s parting lines, you can’t use my rod, I use it when I nod. my sentiments are raw, my tears come easy, my spanish soul is always in a tizzy, I think it’s she and not my skin that’s greasy, hombre cabal is macho not a male bud.

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praising God for his creation and the next moment we wish that a semi would run us over. Some of us escape a few nights from our daily routines. We are frightened by the overwhelming reality around us. We rent a room in the first motel we see and go on to make love. We whisper love words and agonizing angry words to each other for the duration of that one night. We express our doubts with eloquence and mumble our credos. Some of us refuse with all our strength to stop the whirl of activity. We pray to God for more phone calls, for more letters, for more meetings, for more involvement, for more commitments, for more work, so that at no time we find ourselves alone, and thus have to face ourselves. The one who told me these tales says she no longer fears herself. Now she loves herself. She enjoys her own company very much. At times she spends even two or three whole days by herself drinking hot tea and looking out the window. I only wish I were a Cervantes or a Shakespeare to take these inanimate characters and blow life into them with my red ballpoint pen or kiss them tenderly on their eyes or necks so that they would escape the deathspell and would gather life. I only wish . . . Dearest Mindy, you must excuse this lengthy letter. I just couldn’t stop. At times, I swear to you, I saw myself in the words I was printing on the paper. I lost all track or length of time. I actually felt myself cold and alone in that integrated barrio. I kept waiting for Vi to bang on her cardboard box and wake me up. She never did. I kept listening for that drunk teenager to call on his grandmaw, but the— Open up, gran’maw . . . —never reached my ears. Once I even turned around to see if anyone was really taking toy bucketfuls of water from the sea and emptying them in the shoebox full of sand, but all I saw around me were walls, cars driving by, people I did not know. Mindy, after a lengthy bout like this one, I am completely exhausted in my mind. I reach for a beer and the latest copy of Mad magazine. 136

This barrio assumes certain human characteristics which sociologists go on to illustrate in textbooks as caricatures. Assuming a human form also means that the barrio develops a philosophy of life. It knows it must sustain itself by whatever means or hustles possible. It must manufacture its own pride out of the raw materials there. The barrio knows the skin of its streets and alleys trap people within . . . but also keeps those from without. Barrios fight the bulldozer and the ironball of progress which is bent on destroying them and turning them into warehouses and freeways. Most of us who grew up in a barrio miss the heartbeat of that body. We now go on as individual cells seeking a new body. Suburbia is a rather poor substitute, the skeleton is most of the times full of decay. The campus does not come close to the vibrant torso of society: THE BARRIO. Denver’s West Side, El Paso’s El Segundo, East Los have a very definite pulse and smell. Albuquerque, Laredo, Phoenix, Chicago, Oakland, San Antonio and all of the Harlems of the world are all cunas of pride and the best of settings for the human tragedy and comedy of life. Through the broken windows of the minds of two individuals you have looked into one such barrio, Mindy. The Eternal Bill Collector, the Eternal Social Worker seems to visit our barrios constantly looking for all of his lost borreguitos.

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